Boys Will Be Girls Will Be Boys

My daughter was born bald. She came by it naturally as her daddy was a baldy as a baby and seems to be returning to that state again. Hopefully, this doesn’t happen to her. Anyway, her hair grew in incredibly slow and by the time she was about two, she had enough hair to say that she had hair. Not that it was long enough to do anything with, but she wasn’t bald either. I would dress her in pink and yellow with bows and butterflies or lavender with flowers. People would come by to ooh and aah over the baby with the big blue eyes and say, “Oh! Isn’t he cute?”

He?!

I don’t think it was so much that she looked like a boy as much as she just looked like a baby. Ambiguous. And even though I tried to provide visual clues that yes, she was indeed a girl, apparently the lack of hair was more than most people could overcome and, bows and butterflies notwithstanding, they defaulted to “he”. So I am sensitive to the androgynous looking child and take extra effort to correctly identify gender.

All of this is not to say that I think that girls should dress in any particular way either. All my life, I’ve been an athletic person and partial to jeans and t-shirts, sweatpants and sneakers. I’ve had short hair for most of the last twenty years, (except my senior year of high school where I felt that I must have a LOT of hair for my senior prom and grew it to the middle of my back so that I could coif my hair in the ginormous mall style so popular at that time. Two months after prom, I cut it all off again) and with exception of one Halloween where I was actually supposed to be a man, I don’t think I look like one. So I don’t generally feel that clothes or hairstyles should be of any particular style. To each her own, you know?

That said, I would like to issue a note to parents: Don’t let your 5 year old daughters wear denim bib overalls and a baseball hat out in public, particularly if they have really short hair. At this age, she has no other distinguishing characteristics and it is quite possible that people will think she is a boy. So when you ask, “Is that little girl down there?” Instead of someone (like myself, for example) saying, “Yes, she is,” she will look at you quizzically and wonder what you are talking about, forcing you to walk down there and check for yourself. I am only glad that someone (like myself, for example) didn’t say, “No, but that little boy is still there.” Besides being embarrassing for someone (me, again), it seems it would be detrimental to the child. And I’m only thinking of her. Really.

I mean, at 5, kids are still pretty androgynous and hard to differentiate anyway. They all have that same squeaky, hollow-toned voice, the same round cheeks and flat nose. So even though I talked to her, I was quite confident that I was talking to a him. Everything about this child was gender-neutral. Her voice, face, clothes, hair, coat, boots and not that this is a bad thing, intrinsically, but, wow, throw me a bone. A purple t-shirt or a sparkly something. However, I also know, having a strong-willed child myself, that all of this could be entirely of her choosing and her parents are all but helpless to change it. And god bless them for letting her be who she wants.

I also think it’s quite possible that her father was just completely confused and clueless as in the span of 30 minutes he mistakenly called his daughter’s soccer coach Mary instead of Sarah, not once, but three times, called to his neighbor “Janel” who was sitting 3 rows ahead of us only to get on the phone with his wife and find out her name was Daneen (“No wonder she looked at me funny,” he said) and lastly to incorrectly call the Minnesota Gopher’s center Janet McCarville (it’s Janel McCarville, you blasphemer). So maybe he just doesn’t think about whether other people can tell his child is a girl or not. Hell, maybe when he was getting her dressed he forgot, too.

At any rate, I fear I have become one of those people who look at my little girl and say, “Oh! Isn’t he cute?”